EDITORIAL: 26 reasons to act -- Anna Marquez-Greene

Published 12:00 am, Friday, February 15, 2013

The night before sending her off to school Dec. 14, Nelba Marquez-Greene bought her 6-year-old daughter a Kindle Fire for Christmas.

Christmas presents that would never be opened. That's just one of the thousands of painful reminders of what was lost that families have had to endure in the two months since the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

Anna Marquez-Greene was wearing a white T-shirt with purple peace sign on it when she was murdered with a Bushmaster AR-15 semiautomatic rifle.

According to her parents, Anna loved wearing flowers in her hair, loved music and "never walked anywhere."

"Her mode of transportation was dance," they told the friends and family attending her funeral. "She danced from room to room and place to place. She danced to all the music she heard, whether in the air or in her head."

Anna's parents told the New York Times that they've struggled on many days just with going about the basics of life, never mind figuring out how much to wade into the debate over gun control and other measures that might prevent a future tragedy.

"What we desire and deeply pray for is real change," Jimmy Greene told the Times. "Real change happens when we come together on issues that are not political but that are, above all, human issues that affect us all as human beings."

The issues of access to weapons of mass killing and mental health raised by the Newtown shooting are "human safety" issues. Not changing should not be an option for Connecticut's leaders.